Current trends in education systems seem to be more about replacing
traditional approaches, this project wants to compliment them instead. Where
an electronic feature is supported a "traditional" variant should also be
provided. For example there is a lot of activity in on-line testing, so this
project would try to support offline tests as well - ie the priting of tests,
administration of the 'exam' and data input of the results.

The standard approach is that the institution that makes the courseware, owns
the courseware for profit. This project would like to promote the notion of "open
content" where the courseware is available for all. This approach is often a difficult
one to grasp, however MIT have achieved this through their
OpenCourseWare initiative -
if it's good enough for them...

Content authoring will be a major part of this project. Any content written for this
platform should work with others. It should also be possible to deliver it to all kinds
of users and devices. This requires use of XML and conformance to industry vocabularies.
The intention here is to provide an "almost WYSIWYG" environment that can only produce
"legal" content sources. Currently looking at embedding Gecko into desktop apps or using
XUL from within Mozilla.

Standards and specification must be adopted and adhered to. It is high-quality open
documents that makes good software possible. It is a shame that so much "lip-service" is
given to this subject. This applies to technical aspects, like HTML or CSS, as well as
industry sector standards like IMS, SCORM or IEEE.

Last, but by no means least, is the notion of open/free software. This project will be
largely written in Python and Zope (or use other projects that are). In time I would like
to show that this strategy can produce better software than the closed alternatives. The
license for this project is currently GPL, although this is debateable...

Current Status

Only documentation is being worked on at the moment. Two books are being
worked on:-